St Lucia

Victoria Hospital, Castries

• Destination contact(email): None available
• Destination website: None available

My learning objectives

• To experience a healthcare system in a different country and the different health problems which arise.
• To experience a new culture.
• To gain more experience working in areas of medicine I enjoy

What I did...
I spent my time doing a mixture of General Medicine, Surgery and Accident and Emergency work, which gave me a very broad experience. Despite being a popular tourist destination, there is a lot of poverty in St Lucia, with many people not able to afford any healthcare at all. It was a great challenge to practise medicine without having access to various treatments and investigations. If a patient cannot afford a CT scan, they cannot have one. While I was there, I heard of several patients who had died of renal failure because they could not afford to have dialysis, there were long waiting lists for blood transfusions, and the antidote to paracetamol overdose was not available on the island. Many patients had the complications of diabetes and hypertension, especially renal failure, because of the lack of preventative medicine, and I saw much more advanced surgical presentations than I had previously seen, as well as presentations unusual in the UK, such as sickle cell disease and gunshot wounds.